AN ELECTORAL SYSTEM TURNS POLITICS INTO A CIRCUS,
IMPERILING DEMOCRACY

Gregory Freidin

In their rush to rally around the flag of Mr. Grigory
Yavlinsky's party when Russia's Central Election Commission
attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to disqualify it for the
upcoming parliamentary elections, Western news media appear to
have passed over in silence the rumors that the same draconian
measures had been applied -- this time successfully -- to a
little known party with a long name, Progress and Legality:
Democratic Unified Center. The reason, according to a recent
report in Russia's largest-circulation weekly, Argumenty i Fakty,
was that its acronym spelled an expletive -- a more zesty and
apocalyptic Russian equivalent of the English DEEP S***. Indeed,
circus atmosphere permeates the election coverage, whether on TV
or print media, with the Russian disciples of Art Buchwald,
Russell Baker, and Mel Brooks assigned the election stories.

Their subjects oblige: from the Party of Beer Lovers, who
collected the signatures needed to qualify for the elections as
they were treating their constituents to ale, to the
Liberal-Democratic party of Russia of Vladimir Zhirinovsky,
which, along with its other well-known antics, promises a
"30% increase in the standard of living of ordinary
Russians" resulting from the planned "revival of the
military-industrial complex alone." "How did you get
this figure, why 30%, why not 35%?" asked a puzzled
reporter, but then, abashed by his own seriousness, he promptly
answered himself: "Yeah, why ever not!"

Television displays a similar penchant for zroing in on the
funniest comedy routines in Russia's new political theater. On
November 8, the premier evening news program, Novosti, showed the
Chairman of the Central Election Commission, Nikolay Ryabov, a
typical dour unperturbable apparatchik, having a real tantrum,
throwing pencils and berating the country's Constitutional Court.
"It is impossible to follow the law when the country's
supreme judicial authority orders you to break it!," he
screached before the camera, nashing his teeth, as he was
conducting formal proceedings, forced on him by the
Constitutional Court. The supreme judicial body had just ruled
that he would have to qualify the more visible parties among
those that had failed -- as had indeed Yavlinsky's Yabloko and
Vladimir Rutskoi's Great Power -- to follow proper election law
procedures.

Whence, one may ask, is this circus? The structural reason for
it lies in the key principle of Russia's election law that sets
aside half of the State Duma's 450 seats to parties and the other
half to individual candidates (a voter would vote for a party and
for a particular candidate running in the district). To qualify
for the elections, the party must present to the electorate a
roster of candidates and collect 200,000 signatures from
different constituencies (no more than 7% of the signatures must
come from a single district). The framers of the electoral law
pursued a worthy goal: to encourage the growth of parties and
coalitions, to see them emerge, not just in the country's few
cosmopolitan centers, but in the provinces as well.

The result so far has been the opposite, a phenomenon that
social scientists call unanticipated consequences: increasing
fragmentation and factionalism. Feeding this social calamity is
the country's open and boisterous electronic media whose effect
is further amplified by the Russians' strong propensity for
theater. What has emerged, instead of a culture of strong parties
and coalition politics, is the culture of political demagoguery
on a colossal scale.

Party building is hard work, taking a long time, projecting a
political leadership image, especially if the natural talent is
present, requires an incomparably smaller expenditure of time and
effort, if not money. But there are incentives for going choosing
the easy way. To be represented in the State Duma, a party must
win, at least, 5% of the votes cast in the elections, and of
course, the people representing it will be the top ranked names
on the party's slate: 12 names, if the party wins only 5% and
proportionately more, if the number of votes is greater. It is
not surprising that every potentially viable politician in Russia
would like to see his name in the top dozen of a given party
list, thereby increasing her chances to become an MP.

Nor is it surprising to see many politicians jumping from the
roster of one party to another, if the other party offers them a
better chance to climb up to the top of the slate. It was as a
consequences of such party-hopping after the requisite signatures
had been collected that has prompted the Central Election
Commission to try and disqualify several parties. Ryabov's
concern was not political favoritism, but truth in advertising
for political parties who collect signatures with one set of
candidates on the roster but go into elections with a different
one. Be that as it may, the Constitutional Court ruled that the
show must go on.

Come December 17, a Russian citizen, one of those who will,
after all, venture to the polling station, will be confronted
with a bewildering choice of forty (currently registered)
political parties competing for the Duma party seats and between
12 and 20 single mandate candidates vying for the remaining 225
prizes. To compound the problem further, only 25% of the eligible
voters have to show up at the polls for the elections to be
declared valid. Nor are there provisions for run-off elections,
which means, both theoretically and practically, that a candidate
in a crowded district may be a winner even if she gets less than
10% of the votes and more than 50% of votes (by some estimates as
much as 70%) may be cast for parties that would not clear the 5%
barrier, necessary for their representation in the Duma. Such
apprehensions have been expressed by a number of responsible
observers, among the most visible of the them, the Chairman of
the Constitutional Court, Vladimir Tumanov. Is it possible to
classify this electoral system as a form of representative
democracy? The answer: only in a very attenuated sense, no more,
perhaps, than the Russian communism may be classified as a
subspecies of Western social democracy. Indeed, as far as the
probable outcome is concerned, what it resembles, rather, is the
old Soviet system for dispensing privilege.

The amorphousness and fragmentation of the political landscape
on the eve of the parliamentary election makes the Communist
Party of Russia stand out from the crowd. Paradoxically, stripped
of its monopoly on power, its ranks radically thinned out due to
its reputation as well as the availability of ample economic
opportunity in Russia's burgeoning private sector, CPR (no pun
intended) is, perhaps, the only party in Russia in the proper
Western sense of the term. Its organization is far flung, its
cadres are disciplined, and its constituency devoted enough to
march to the polls even if the weather beacons the rest of the
electorate to spend the day in the country (as happened in
Volgograd in September, where the Communists handily defeated the
Army's lunatic fringe in a local elections; no other party
fielded candidates in the contest). The only problem for the CPR
is that its constituency consists, by and large, of retired
people, and even as the odds on favorite, the party is not
expected to win more than 12-13% of the party slate vote.

According to recent polls, among the serious political
organization, the runners-up are expected to be, on the
reformers' side, Yavlinsky's Yabloko with about 8%; on the
"nationalist" side, the rather moderate Congress of
Russian Communities, headed by Yuri Skokov and General Alexander Lebed, with about 6%; and on the centrist, i.e., governmental
side, Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin's party, the bland
sounding "Our Home Is Russia," with 5%. Few other
parties - among them Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats,
pro-communist conservative Agrarians, the flip-flop party, Women
of Russia, but not Gaidar's Russia's Choice -- are expected to
squeak into the Duma.

The coming political crisis, then, is not likely to stem from
the communists' "victory at the polls". They will not
get enough seats to become the dominant player in the new Duma, a
largely powerless body as the Russian Constitution of 1993
defined it. Rather, it is the ever-increasing factionalism of the
political life of the country that should give everyone pause.
Indeed, a suspicion is spreading among some of the more
intelligent Russia watchers both inside and outside the country
that the system that has emerged in the wake of the Soviet
Union's collapse, in particular the Duma electoral system, is
dissipating, rather than strengthening, the country's still
powerful democratic impulse. The circus atmosphere
notwithstanding, the Public Opinion Foundation reported in its
recent survey that the issues of "social equity" and
"crime," the special code words of the communist party
and the nationalist right, are still less of concern to the
Russians than democracy's tried and true "rule of law"
and "human rights". The longer those Russian
politicians who identify with this popular agenda continue to
squabble among themselves, the greater the likelihood, to
paraphrase the Federalist, that the Russian citizens' "fear
of discord and disunion among its counsellors will exceed their
apprehension of treachery or incapacity in a single
individual." Russia's presidential election is scheduled for
June 1996, and those "single indivuduals" whom the
Federalist had in mind are standing in the wings. This, then, is
the political context against which Boris Yeltsin will be making
his decision whether or not to seek the second term.